lkml.org 
[lkml]   [1998]   [Oct]   [25]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
Date
From
SubjectRe: ARMS WAVING!!! Proposal to fix /proc dainbrammage.
On Sun, 25 Oct 1998 robbie@scot-mur.demon.co.uk wrote:

> > What about them? fscanf should be able to handle the above type of
> > format quite nicely.
>
> It's not as efficiant as reading binary. Imho a lot of /proc could be
> replaced by user space utilities for humans and shell scripts. The kernel
> shouldn't have a ui.

I'll just put my cent.
IMHO /proc should be human readable.
There is an entire filesystem built to let the users have the /proc files
that can be catted etc etc.

Following your reasoning why, for the sake of Crist, we have written an
entire filesystem ? What about system calls ? Aren't them much more
efficient ?

But obviously having a /proc filesystem is more handy than have a set of
system calls (or a single ... a la' pstat()). So what's the point ?
We have a filesystem. We have cat'table files. The files _have_ to be
human readable. If not, the entire meaning and usefulness of /proc is
_shit_. We can get rid of 300 Kb of fs/proc/* and write a new system call
in kernel/*.

Again ... I'm not suggesting to rm -rf fs/proc/ ... I just want to point
out that the existence of /proc is justified by having some files
that can be catted to have some vital informations handy and with the word
handy I mean human-readable. Formatting of numbers can be done by the
kernel. The routines that do it are called only when 'cat /proc/something'
so there's no loss of efficiency for the kernel itself.

And ... what about all that printk about ide-reset ... scsi-timeout ...
etc etc ... why not coding all that messages in a single 32 bit number ?
So we can get rid of _all_ the kernel human readable messages.
No thanks!!!

Blah ... this discussion is getting boring.

Ciao,
Riccardo.


-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2005-03-22 13:45    [W:0.043 / U:0.320 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site